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Monday, March 28, 2011

New Beginning 845

I remember my childhood in Gray Sector of Panocadia Three as a series of comic book pages, each panel painting a lurid vignette of young lust and desire. Years later, with the zombie plague behind us, the grand kids want to know about the not-so-grand and amazingly un-glorious days of my youth. I thought myself precocious in all concerns governmental, sexual, scientifical and obviously parental. Oh to be young again, to have the clear visions the world. Yeah. Right. Sure.

Think bucolic; a family at church, a sunny Sunday swaddled in the fragrance of Acacia, birds chirping and the preacher breathing fire and brimstone to the undeserving of his congregation. Now forget that. In reality, it's stinking hot in Gray Sector thanks to a failure of a weather machines in Engineering. The metal benches of the Quonset hut each have a bouquet of plastic lilies that were never alive. A make believe church redolent of sweaty armpits and motor oil suffering under the weight of Preacher Bosco's never-ending sermon. Cue the recorded pastoral organ music. The last things in our thoughts were zombies.

Now forget that.

In reality, the climate controlled atmosphere of D-Ward is cool. Plus there are no metal benches. Everything in here is padded. They don't let us play around metal.

The organ music is just the creaking of my cell door as the nurses come to bring me lunch.

And zombies? I was always, always worried about zombies. That's what got me committed here in the first place.

Zombies should have been our first thought. Man alive. We were caught with our WD40 down in an engineering failure. What were we thinking?

WD is the only thing that stopped the fetid, vile smelling flesh craving sons of guns.

Preacher Bosco was so wrapped up in his own sermon he never smelled or heard the gray, lumping, shuffling thing come from behind until it was too late.

We, the parishoners, watched as the zombie chieftan grabbed Bosco and ripped his head off. We hated it when engineering went down. Good preachers were hard to find in the youth of my days. To tell the truth, Bosco wasn't that good. We moved on efficiently and learned to live with the monsters we'd created. Another engineering failure made good. I was a young and callow fellow.

P1: Get rid of "amazingly". And "scientifical." Change "Three" to "3." The grandkids sentence is in present tense. Unless the rest of the paragraph is what you're telling the grandkids, in which case it needs quotation marks, get rid of it for now; bring it in after you finish talking about the past. You don't need all three of the words at the end. Any one will do. Add "of" after "clear visions."

P2. Plastic lilies that were never alive is redundant unless this is a world where some plastic lilies once were alive. Each "has." Or "all" have. Not sure giving us the first sentence and then saying "Forget that" is helping you. If you dump it we get to the zombies faster.

Did you ever wish someone dead only to realize that you could not imagine a world without them? But that's not the story I'm telling today.

Those two sentences get inserted between these two paragraphs because. Of course when anyone says, "That's not the story I"m going to tell you" they mean the opposite. That's the point. I couldn't write the story without a moral or drama. Merely making fun of zombies or teen boys and their lusts doesn't make a story. It only makes details.

I had to face the fact that the speaker was a snide, smart-mouthed kid and if I only wrote that story, it wouldn't be interesting. He had to change. That's why there is this look look back aspect to the opening. That's why I added those two sentences as paragraph 2.

This was a writing exercise if you want to see what happens if the kid doesn't grow old and get some smarts about him. It's just crude, rude and snarky.

The kid loses his parents and childhood in the zombie attack. He can't remain unscathed and juvenile.

And yes, I do go back the chunks of good prose. writing exercises, half-finished and "might-have-been" stories on my hard drive and try to create something usable from them. Waste not want not. If it was good enough for EE, it might fit somewhere else. It might inspire. It might make a good scene. So this is another "Thanks EE" when it gets published.

Re kiddies' interest: I used to TRY to get my grandmother to talk about the past (Russian immigrant, rough past) and she never would. Some reluctance on the older guy's part might create more kiddies' interest